Note: This can be copied onto a word document and printed--example HERE (select 4 pages per sheet when printing). Or it can be read online. It’s not necessary to read the whole thing. Some of it will give the flavor.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid can be found on the Internet in several places. It can be found at esl-bits at this link HERE. Or the audio book can be found on Youtube HERE.
(These links may go dead at some point in the future, but you can probably find other versions online easily enough.)
I copied some of Diary of a Wimpy Kid onto handouts in my class, but it wasn't necessary to do more than a few pages for them to get the idea. (I played the audio book for them a bit longer, but not much longer.)
For production, I discussed with the students briefly which parts of this book were unique to American schools, and which parts applied to Vietnam. (I'm currently teaching in Vietnam, but obviously you can change the context to wherever you happen to be teaching.) Students then put some similarities or differences into the table on the handout. Students then had the production prompt: "Imagine you are writing a diary about what it’s like to be a kid in Vietnamese middle school. What could you say?" They could do this either as a written story or as drawing a comic book.
Kinney commented that he enjoyed writing the book because "there’s so much humor to be mined in the world of middle school romance."[2]
I should have talked more in my video about the school dance and the angst about getting a date which was the focus point of much of this book, but I didn't.
If I had talked about it, however, my commentary would have been much the same as the rest of the book--i.e. some of it was funny, but mostly the situations were pushed too far so that it took me out of the book.
As you probably already know, there's a whole series of these books out now (see list on Wikipedia). My school library has several of them. I may check out a few more books from this series eventually. But I don't want to ruin it by doing it all at once. (Sometimes the humor of a particular author or cartoonist can get spoiled if you indulge too much too quickly). Maybe I'll give it a few weeks before checking out the next one.
But, I changed my mind. We had a 4 day holiday weekend here in Vietnam, I was looking for some light reading, and I thought to myself, "Well, after all, why not? If I'm having fun with this series, why not just continue?"
And so I went back to the shelves of the school library.
I had wanted to continue with the Wimpy Kid books in order, but the 2nd and 3rd books (Roderick Rules and The Last Straw, respectively) were not on the library shelves. (Either our library didn't have them, or someone else had them checked out. I never did bother to check the library database to see which it was.) And so, I jumped to the 4th book in the series: Dog Days.
The Reading Experience / Evaluation
With a series as prolific as Diary of a Wimpy Kid, (17 books and counting), I knew it was probably only going to be a matter of time before the author started running out of ideas, and the books began to decline in quality. But the question is, how long would it be before that happened?
Well, here we are. 4 books in, and the author has run out of ideas, and the books have declined in quality.
I wonder how the 2nd and 3rd books hold up. Was the drop off in quality immediate after the first book? Or was the decline more gradual? Maybe some day I'll get my hands on the 2nd and 3rd books, and then I can let you know. But for the moment, all I've got is the 4th book, so that's all I can talk about.
A number of the same ideas are recycled from the first book: once again, much of the plot is about the friendship between the main character (Greg Heffley) and his best friend (Rowley Jefferson). Once again, they have a fight, and then have to get reconciled. Once again, during Greg's fight with Rowley, the weird kid Fregley shows up as a possible substitute friend.
Once again, there's a comic strip in the paper that comes to an end, and once again Greg Heffley tries to submit his own comic as a replacement.
Once again, Greg Heffley has a lazily thought out get-rich-quick business plan, and ropes Rowley into it. And once again, the poorly thought out idea immediately falls apart on them.
To be fair, I don't know what else I really expected Jeff Kinney to do. He's locked into the same characters and settings from the first book. This whole series is exploring the drama of junior high school. It's not like Tintin where he can send Greg and Heffley to a new exotic location with every new book. There's probably only a limited number of stories he can tell with the setting he's got. (How in the world did he get 17 books out of this series? I'm almost tempted to read the whole thing just to find out.)
But... more than the recycled plot elements, the big thing is that this book just isn't that funny.
The first Diary of a Wimpy Kid was funny. I chuckled a lot while reading it. But there were no chuckles to be had while reading Dog Days.
Now, pinpointing exactly why something is funny, and why something is not, is always difficult to do. Some people who understand the mechanics of humor very well can do it, but I've never been one of those people. I usually just know when I laugh, and when I don't.
That being said, the one thing I can point to is that the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid was more grounded and realistic. It was the kind of thing you could totally imagine a junior high school kid doing or thinking, but just told in a humorous way.
Mostly. As I wrote in my original review, it could alternate between realistic and far-fetched. But the realistic elements were there.
But in Dog Days, it's mostly far-fetched. The main character does things that are so cringe that you can't imagine any real kid doing them.
Now, there is admittedly a kind of draw to cringe humor. There are a number of episodes in this book when Greg Heffley gets himself deeper and deeper into cringe situations, and as things get more and more cringe, there is a fascination with wondering how it will all blow up in his face, and what the big pay-off is going to be.
...except, there's never any big pay-off. Greg Heffley will just mention that someone got upset with him, or someone gave him a dirty look, or something like that, and that seems to be all the pay-off you get with this book.
So, although this book did hold my attention at the time, and did keep me turning the pages (I finished it in just one day), it also did leave me with a flat and empty feeling at the end. I didn't feel rewarded for having read this book, I just mostly felt let down.
Connections with Other Books I've Read
* At one point in this book, Greg's mother tries to make him read Charlotte's Web.
Odds and Ends
* In spite of the negative review I gave to this book, I just may yet continue on with this series. Stay tuned.
I suspect their popular everywhere. (Right? I don't know, leave a comment and let me know about how often you see these books around where you live.)
But in Vietnam, they've been everywhere.
It's probably more noticeable in Vietnam, because whenever you walk into a bookshop, the supply of English books is limited to only a few shelves. And Diary of a Wimpy Kid is always among the limited selection.
The very visual nature of this book makes it tempting for Vietnamese students of English, who think that it will be an easy read. (Although the amount of slang and colloquial expressions in this book make it a lot harder than it looks for English language learners.) So I frequently see my Vietnamese students and colleagues attempting to read this book.
But this book has also been translated into Vietnamese, and it has proven to be extremely popular in Vietnam in translation. (I think 5 years ago in Vietnam, it was especially popular. I remember a period when all of my students seemed to be carrying around the Vietnamese translation of this book.)
Another audio book from http://esl-bits.net/ Diary of a Wimpy Kid. http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks/Wimpy.Kid/indice.html This is another children's book. This one is pitched at slightly older kids (10-11). The vocabulary is slightly more advanced, and it also contains more slang terms and idioms. But on the plus side, each individual chapter is very short, so it's very easy to do this in short listening sessions. And in my experience, this book has been popular with students in Vietnam.
And yet, I had never actually read the book myself. Until now...
Why I Read This Book
As I've been mentioning in the Weekly Reading Vlogs, my schedule at work has recently changed so that I now have an early morning class, and an afternoon class, and an extended lunch break in the afternoon. I usually relax at lunch and get a few pages of reading done, but then one day I forgot my book. (I had taken it out of my work bag to read some of it at dinner, and then forgotten to put it back in my bag.)
Fortunately, my school has a library, so it was easy to pick up a new book.
However, I already have 9 books on my currently reading list that I'm not doing very well on (HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE). And I had told myself I was absolutely not allowed to pick up any new books until I finished what was already on my plate. But what was I going to do? Make it through lunch without a book to read?
So, I compromised and decided to find the lightest, shortest, easiest to read book possible. And Diary of a Wimpy Kid seemed to fit the bill perfectly.
The Reading Experience / Evaluation
I did not expect to enjoy this book as much as I did.
I mean, sure, I knew it would be humorous. But it is also a kids' book. And kids are usually pretty soft targets when it comes to humor. So I figured the book would be mildly interesting, but not much more.
But, to my pleasant surprise, I got quite a few chuckles out of this book. It's really funny.
After reading this book, I went over to the Wikipedia page, and it turns out this book grew out of a webcomic, and that originally the book was supposed to be pitched at an adult audience. But the publishers convinced the author to target the children's market instead. (see HERE)
So that probably explains why this book can tickle the adult funny bone just as much as it can a child's.
There's no real plot to this book--it's just a series of episodes and events. (I suspect this is also a legacy of the book having started life as a webcomic.) There are occasionally call backs to events that happened earlier in the book, but for the most part it's just a bunch of random things that happened to the main character over the course of a school year.
In my opinion, the book is at its funniest when its simply functioning as a commentary on the kind of stuff that every middle school kid experiences. The part about the difference between dad and mom's discipline style, for example, was one of many sections that got a chuckle out of me because of how relatable it was:
(Oh man, my parents were totally like that! Anyone else can relate?)
...and there were a lot of sections like this.
There were some other sections, however, which weren't so realistic. For example, the whole section about the haunted house episode (you can read it here) struck me as pretty far fetched. I understand the humor was supposed to derive from the main character screwing things up so badly, but I couldn't imagine a real kid actually doing this, and it struck me as a bit too desperate to set up a get a laugh. And there are a few sections like that throughout the book.
So some really funny sections, and some not so funny sections, but on the whole I found myself laughing and enjoying this book more often than not.
Other Odds and Ends
* I debated whether or not to count his as a graphic novel, or as a proper book.
The distinction, as far as this blog is concerned, is that graphic novels get a video review, but no written review.
This book has so many cartoons throughout that it's almost really more of a comic than a proper book. And yet, there is some text. Maybe just enough text to count this as a book with cartoons instead of a cartoon book?
My school library has this book classified in the general fiction section, and not the graphic novel section. In the end, I let that tip the balance. I'm counting this as a book. (But... I'll also put it in my graphic novel index.)
* As you probably already know, there's a whole series of these books out now (see list on Wikipedia). My school library has several of them. I may check out a few more books from this series eventually. But I don't want to ruin it by doing it all at once. (Sometimes the humor of a particular author or cartoonist can get spoiled if you indulge too much too quickly). Maybe I'll give it a few weeks before checking out the next one.
As I mentioned above, sometimes it can be really funny and relatable, and sometimes it loses its touch by getting a bit too far-fetched. But it's really funny more often than not. Let's go with 8 out of 10 stars. (Look, it's not great literature. But you have to judge these things against what they set out to do. This book set out to be a funny comic. It was pretty funny. 8 stars it is.)
